Archive for category: Society

New duties, flawed concepts On 1 July 2015, a new legal duty was placed on schools and early years and childcare providers to have ‘due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’. The revised statutory guidance stipulates that ‘being drawn into terrorism includes not just […]

“I know the whole House will want to join me in marking Holocaust Memorial Day. It is right our whole country should stand together to remember the darkest hour of humanity. Last year, on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I said we would build a striking national […]

‘Why Is My Curriculum White?’, a campaign set up by UCL in 2015, aims to grapple with an academic curriculum in which a white voice is overbearing and all-permeating. The campaign highlights the crucial necessity to reflect on academia’s complicity in white supremacy; in the case of UCL, not only […]

The Logic of State Education Since their creation in 1870, state schools have experienced more, not less, direct political intervention in the structure and content of their teaching. Even before state schools were introduced there were fears of a political nature from both the upper and lower classes. The upper […]

One of the more pleasant aspects of the growing anti-gentrification movements has been the increasing presence of children at organising meetings and direct actions. Not only has this posed new challenges in providing mutual acts of childcare, the presence of children has also required a reconfiguration of space to accommodate […]

Eighty-five thousand and counting. This is the number of bodies incarcerated at any one time in Britain’s crumbling and overcrowded prisons. It’s a figure that has almost doubled over the past 20 years, a carceral inflation that puts England and Wales at the top of the table for its per […]

The following story is a mix of fact and fiction. Outside Mumbai, a worker in a surrogacy home was refused permission to travel back to her village to visit a dying relative. The gestational surrogate, like all the others in her dormitory, was growing a fetus whose genetic design and […]

In recent weeks the mainstream media spotlight has shone on the conditions faced by the hundreds of people in the UK who are imprisoned in immigration detention centres. A large number of detainees reacted to reports by staging protests (certainly not for the first time) from within detention, with many […]

The United Kingdom is facing an unprecedented expansion of the prison system, justified by appeals to ‘public safety’ and the supposed economic benefits for ‘local communities’. In response, a new campaign network has been launched called Community Action on Prison Expansion (CAPE). CAPE aims to counter expansion plans and stem the […]

When the Empty Cages Collective facilitates workshops on prison abolition we ask participants to share their first cultural memory of prison. Was it the TV show Porridge? Or when Dumbo the Elephant’s mum is locked up? Together we explore how normalised prisons are and how, as abolitionist Angela Davis describes, “prison […]